Ubiquitous Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging (USAR-Im)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Otmar Loffeld (†)
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 346974191

The continuous, daylight and weather independent monitoring of our environment, of our surroundings, moving objects (e.g. traffic monitoring) on ground (cars) or in the air (aircrafts) or on sea (ship and vessel monitoring) is an increasingly important and wide field of user and application interests for sustainable development, for logistics and for security and requires satellites with a permanent ubiquitously (microwave) illumination capability. Because of the extremely high operational cost for the primary radar stations currently used for air traffic monitoring, there is an urgent need for alternative technologies yielding cost-effective and global coverage. However, conventional civilian Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, like TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, COSMO-Skymed, RADARSAT-2 and SENTINEL-1 are operated in a sun-synchronous orbit which only allows daylight synchronous observation on the one hand, while the orbit time on the other is in the range of 95 min, allowing only revisit times of the same area of interest of the order of several days (as in the case of TerraSAR-X).Therefore, in order to observe the same area on Earth for a longer time, the orbit, rather than being sun synchronous, should be geostationary enabling the satellite to virtually stay over the same spot and constantly illuminate an as large area of interest as possible, pushing the operational geostationary communication satellite systems like the SES-ASTRA and EUTELSAT HOT BIRD satellites into the focus of interest of this proposal. These systems shall be investigated and studied as permanent and ubiquitous microwave illuminators used for bi- and multistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging.This proposal aims at exploiting the ubiquitously available microwave signals of geostationary communication satellites using Software Defined Radio (SDR) with versatile front-end technology, and then subsequently process the acquired data into medium resolution (20 m) 2D/3D images using versatile but highly powerful graphics hardware (GPU), integrated in general purpose computers. Thus in spite of all addressed technical and technological challenges the proposal aims at demonstrating the feasibility and versatility of "Ubiquitous Medium Resolution SAR Imaging"

• DFG Programme: Research Grants